TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Dark Knight Rises, Old DC Universe Falls

You can skip the nerdy list directly below if you want to
move on to the more Batman-related stuff in this entry, which normal folk might
understand. I mention the time I met
Christopher Nolan. (Regardless, you need
to attend the Spider-Man/Batman debate
I’m hosting next Wednesday at Muchmore’s at 8pm).

Here’s a (very rough) list of twenty-five things I liked
(in no particular order) about the past few decades of DC Comics. Those of you in the know will see this list and understand how easy DC Comics has made it for me to (almost completely) stop reading their
stuff, even though I sincerely hope new readers will love the future as much as
I loved these bits of the past:

•Pariah

•Harbinger

•Anti-Monitor/Monitor(s)

•Gog, in some sense (more for the questions he raised, as
with many time-things)

•all the multiversal/time hijinx over the years (including
Freedom Fighters)

•interwoven elements of the Superman mythos from just prior
to Flashpoint

•the Flashes’ marriages

•Superman’s marriage

•Green Arrow and Black Canary’s relationship

•ambiguity of Phantom Stranger’s origin

•Final Crisis, which killed off Darkseid

Despite all these losses (these things all having been eliminated in last year’s reboot), I am, in the
end, comfortable with the reboot for the simple reason that most comics are
stupid – as you can tell by going back and reading them years later – and every
few years most of the accumulated crap has to be disavowed one way or another
anyway. I mean, hell, prior to the
Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot in 1985, one of the Freedom Fighters, the Ray,
was described as having gained his vast energy powers simply because he was exposed to lightning and
sunlight at the same time while hot air ballooning. That’s beyond retarded. And so I do not weep for the Millennium
Giants, so to speak.

(I’d thought the Legion – very ironically, given all the
reboots that team has gone through – had emerged from last year’s relaunch as
the DC series with the most intact
continuity, since writer Paul Levitz’s current run sounded like it was of a
piece with almost all his prior stories and, since it takes place in the
thirty-first century, is sufficiently removed from most of the DC Universe to
suffer few necessary editorial ripple effects from the overall line-wide
relaunch. But in an interview, Levitz
said a six-issue arc in 2013 will introduce the villainous Fatal Five as if for the first time, in keeping
with “the new DC logic.” Sad news for
anyone still clinging to that tiny bit of the old ways. The future dies last, as it were – but at
least it’ll be drawn by the nostalgia-inducing Keith Giffen, as it was in the
80s and early 90s. But is Gates still
supposed to be from an alternate universe?)

But let us move on to Batman.

•When I briefly met Christopher Nolan,

the Dark Knight
Director, I told him I hoped this summer’s version of Bane would be better than
the one from Batman and Robin – here’s a clip of that Bane,
just in case you managed to repress the terrible memory from fifteen years ago. I was with DC Comics employees when I saw
Batman and Robin, and one who might prefer not to be named (it wasn’t Nybakken)
reacted by saying, “It’s like watching that gravy train go right off a cliff,
isn’t it?”

I was one of countless civilians who tried to warn Nolan
that unless Bane’s dialogue is audible through his mask – which was a problem
in an early cut of the film – people might think the Joel Schumacher version of
Bane was better. And that would be tragic. Nolan seemed to understand. If you enjoy the final results when you hear
Bane this weekend, maybe you should send me a few bucks out of gratitude.

•I’d bet a billion capitalist dollars the original Christopher
Nolan plan, when he shot the final sequences of Batman Begins, was to explain Batman’s vast rogues gallery as
Arkham escapees driven coocoo-bananas by Scarecrow’s fear gas. But it appears likely Nolan’s films will end
without that ever having been referenced or used as an explanation since it
happened at the end of the first film.
If I’m wrong, don’t tell me – no spoilers!

•There was briefly a blonde Batgirl named Stephanie recently
(as noted in the list above), and DC not only ditched her over the objections
of many fans when the universe got rebooted last year but then yanked her at
the last minute from the separate universe of the Smallville spin-off comic book.
That just got revised, mere weeks before its release, to be the more
familiar Barbara Gordon, likely meaning there was a creepy edict from the
movie/TV overlords at Warner Bros. saying “Same characters in all media!”

I don’t much care about that, but I do wonder if the
higher-ups will also someday throw a shit-fit over the fact that the characters
called “Young Justice” on TV are called “Teen Titans” in the comics, whereas
the characters called “Teen Titans” on TV don’t all exist in the comics anymore. Branding poses some complications that even
rebooting the universe cannot easily untangle.